AERT VAN DER NEER | Winter landscape with kolf players

Comte Henri Greffulhe (1848–1932), by whom acquired in 1868 through François Nieuwenhuys for 215 guineas; Thence by inheritance until sold by order of the Comtesse Greffulhe and the Duc and Duchesse de Gramont, London, Sotheby's, 22 July 1937, lot 73, for £1,000 to Rosenberg (London), for F. Sabin?;

Anonymous sale ('The Property of a Gentleman'), London, Christie's, 6 July 1990, lot 114;

With Klaus Edel, Cologne, by whom exhibited at TEFAF, Maastricht, in 1991;

With Noortman Master Paintings, Maastricht, 2000;

From whom acquired by an American private collector in 2005;

By whom sold, New York, Sotheby's, 24 January 2008, lot 17, for $2.05 million;

With Noortman Master Paintings, by whom sold to the present collector before 2010.

F. Bachmann, Aert van der Neer, Bremen 1982, p. 135, reproduced plate 108, and in colour p. 112; Die Weltkunst, June 1990, p. 1759, reproduced in colour;

W. Schulz, Aert van der Neer, Doornspijk 2002, p. 189, no. 225, reproduced in colour plate 3, and ill. 30.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Aert van der Neer. Winter Landscape with Golf Players and Skaters. Signed in monogram at lower left. This painting is on an oak panel, with an old cradle - the vertical bars may be slightly more recent. The cradle may date back to the turn of the twentieth century and narrow strips were also added around the edges. There are various ancient cracks, largely in the centre and upper right areas, with rather calmer wood lower down. These are clearly visible under ultra violet light, through retouching, with a single crack slanting down across the centre, three or four across the upper centre, and others fairly evenly at the sides, with very little disturbance in the lower panel, and all the movement seemingly having taken place in the sky. In fact the movement appears to have happened in the past, with the panel having stabilised itself long ago. There are various scattered old and more recent retouchings, the more recent being over little incidental marks in the dark clouds and across the centre, but the overall condition remains exceptionally good, despite past cracks. The vigorous brushwork remains finely intact, with much delicate detail throughout. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

On a freezing cold but still day in the depth of winter, two gentlemen are playing a game of kolf on a frozen canal in the late afternoon, the creamy glow of the sky behind the trees towards the left hinting at the westering sun. Snow is frozen onto the branches of the trees to the left, and on the thatched roof of a farmhouse, while lowering grey clouds above, and cumulus clouds towards the right horizon hint at further snow to fall. A third man relieves himself in the right foreground, and there are further figures beyond, all of them on the ice. To the right, our view recedes towards a distant walled town and in between, figures skate on a broader expanse of ice. Aert van der Neer’s composition is set on an unforced diagonal, the left marked off by a repoussoir of buildings and trees, while the right is open, both near the viewer where a frozen watercourse arrives from the left, and beyond where it has curved round the centre of the picture plane and recedes to the far distance. Aert van der Neer made two specific genres his own: winter landscapes and moonlit landscapes; and apart from his early career, painted no other type of subject. Both are usually based on rivers or canals occupying the central part of the composition, receding towards the horizon. Both must have been equally sought-after in his own day, because he painted many of each, but his winter landscapes are now by far his most prized paintings, and the best ones are highly sought-after. Van der Neer’s nine most expensive paintings sold at auction are winter scenes (this picture is the fifth). 

In Aert van der Neer the winter landscape, pioneered by Hendrick Avercamp, and essayed by most of the leading landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age, reached its apogee, so that when we think of a Dutch village in winter, Van der Neer’s paintings of them are the most likely to spring first to mind. This is not a whim of latter-day collecting taste, a generation of Dutch romantic landscape painters in the first half of the nineteenth century modelled their own highly successful evocations of winter on his paintings. Because he was so influential, Van der Neer’s own winter landscapes do not now seem particularly revolutionary, but in their own day they were strikingly original and broke fresh ground. He may have been able to achieve this because he was probably self-taught. His early works are closer in style to those of his friends the brothers Rafael and Joachim Camphuysen, with whom he sometimes collaborated, but from his early maturity onwards, his winter landscapes owe remarkably little stylistic debt to those of his peers.

Few of Van der Neer’s paintings are dated, but this work, dated circa 1650 or to the early 1650s by Wolfgang Schulz, is a superb example of his early maturity.¹ Particularly remarkable is the quality of light. Van der Neer has used predominantly cool tones, including those of the blue sky visible between patches of grey cloud, to evoke the transient mood of this late afternoon scene. The creamy yellow tone of the invisible waning sun is deliberately remote, passing out of the picture plane behind trees and buildings, and out of the scene depicted. We are left in no doubt that when it has set, the intense cold will take rapid hold as the light fades: it is already nearly time to go home and get warm; in less than an hour this scene will be largely empty of human presence, even though the sky will hold on tenaciously to the last recollections of daylight.

Van der Neer was usually economic in his use of paint, laying it on thickly only when the desired effect demanded it. Here he has in parts deliberately left the ochre ground layer exposed, or merely washed over it with thin glazes, so that it contributes to the structure of the painting. The areas around the branches of trees and the timbers of the wooden houses and barns show the bare ground of the picture, and he has likewise left it almost untouched by the brush on the foreground.


NOTE ON PROVENANCE

The Greffulhe collection was one of great quality and renown, and its sale at Sotheby's in London in 1937 caused a sensation. Upon the announcement of the sale, A.C.R. Carter trumpeted in the London Times that 'France is to lose one of her most famous private collections of art treasures', noting with glee that 'those well-known members of the French noblesse, the Comtesse de Greffulhe and the Duc and Duchesse de Gramont have decided to send to London their joint possessions – wonderful pictures, tapestries and objets d'art – for dispersal in the open market'.  In fact, the Comtesse was a great Anglophile, and a friend of Edward VII, and their collection, housed in their château at Bois-Boudran and in the Rue d'Astorg, Paris, was formed under the guidance of the Comte d'Armaillé, who also helped their relative, Sir Richard Wallace, to form the Wallace collection during the same years. The greatest treasures in the collection were French eighteenth-century paintings and drawings, including a sheet of studies by Watteau that fetched the astonishing price of £5,800. There was also a small but choice assembly of Dutch seventeenth-century pictures, of which the most expensive was a Jan Steen which fetched £1,250, followed by the present Van der Neer and a Paulus Potter at £1,000 each. The sale, which realized £41,000, was a resounding success, and  was in other ways a foretaste of times to come – for example, the family sat in a private room, the sale relayed to them by a microphone placed in front of the auctioneer. At the close of the sale they 'manifested much elation', as The Times put it.

1 Schulz 2002, p. 189, no. 225, as 'authentic and important'.